Tuesday, 29 October 2013

I had a pleasant surprise one Saturday, when a visit to my
parents resulted in receiving a new bottle of whisky. Apparently my dad had
been emptying out the pantry because they needed to find storage space for some
things that had been displaced by the arrival of a dishwasher, and he found
some booze hidden away in there – you wouldn’t get that in my house. I
was invited to take a look – like one of those experts they get in on Cash
in the Attic.

First out were 20cl bottles of Gordon’s Gin and Smirnoff
vodka. Pretty standard, and no more than I had expected. I would have been
happy to take these off their hands – I’m not a big fan of Smirnoff, or the
whole genre of gin, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have requirements – nevertheless,
my mum laid claim to those, for drinking with orange or tonic or whatever – she
doesn’t normally, and actually had to ask me what she could mix vodka with. The
answer? Nearly anything.

Far more interesting than those anyway, was what came out of
the pantry next: White Horse blended scotch (40% ABV). It’s not a brand you
hear much about, being as it is, more popular and readily available in overseas
markets. I had heard of it though, from a brief perusal of sub-£20 blends on
The Whisky Exchange (£18.55 + P&P, btw). Reviews were exclusively good so
I’d made a mental note to keep an eye out for it next time I was looking to buy
a blend.

It scores an impressive 90.5 in Jim Murray’s 2013 Whisky
Bible, is made up of 40% malt whisky, and has as its base, the excellent
Lagavulin single malt. I read somewhere though, that it is actually blended
from around 40 malts in total. Does that mean each malt comprises only 1% of
the resulting blend?

Where did this buried treasure come from? Apparently it all
used to belong to my granddad… who died about 15 years ago. None of the bottles
have been opened, so it should be fine – despite the fact that there looks to
be a lot of air at the top of my bottle – perhaps some of it had evaporated? I’ve
read before that whisky will taste as good as when it was bottled for hundreds
of years, as long as the bottle remains unopened. And now this particular
bottle belongs to me and there is no longer any chance of it remaining unopened
for hundreds of years. I give it a week or two at most.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but when my
grand parents learned they were not much longer for this world, they started
asking me if there was anything of theirs I wanted. I said that I would like
whatever they specifically wanted to give me. The person is more important to
me than their stuff. A word of advice for you though, if an elderly relative of
yours asks you this question, think about saying, “I wouldn’t mind having your
booze”. You never know, you might get something valuable. Worst case scenario:
some bottles of booze.

Something else my granddad did as the end approached was to
try to give me the benefit of some useful things he had learned. One was about
changing a tyre, that I’ve sadly forgotten, and the other was about how to
emerge from a shower cubicle in winter without feeling the cold.

White Horse, I see, is one of Diageo’s blends, though my
internet research so far has not revealed for how long Diageo has produced this
particular brand. Diageo was formed in 1997 from a merger between Guinness and
Grand Metropolitan, and that’s probably roughly around the time this particular
bottle was produced, though nowhere on it is the name Diageo mentioned,
and to be fair, my granddad could have had it for quite sometime before he
passed on anyway. It remains to be seen then, whether this bottle is
representative of the White Horse brand you might be able to buy today, since
I’ll need to buy a new bottle to determine that.

Have you ever inherited any booze? I remember now that when
my Grandma died, I was given a litre bottle of Teachers so, you know, it would
be interesting to know what gets left behind at the end of a person’s life. If
you were proper into whisky you’d probably make sure you were finishing the
good stuff in your last days – or maybe there are more important considerations
for the terminally ill. Would you drink the good stuff, leaving the Teachers,
or would you save something special for the end?

A Few Weeks Later…

So, what about this White Horse, then? I broke the seal and
gave it a first tasting the night of the Confederations Cup Final, and was
impressed right away. In the glass, it looks simply beautiful. There’s
something about that rich hue that shimmers invitingly in kitchen lighting
conditions. Incidentally, I'm sorry but I don't seem to have taken a picture of the bottle. I don't know how that happened.

As I said, it is supposed to be founded on Lagavulin, and
while I can’t say I detect that in there specifically, there is a definite feel
of Islay. This is a nice blend – not as great as the Jim McEwan’s Symphony that
rocketed right to the top of my blend league – but approaching that level of
complexity and refinement.

After a couple of tastings I started to detect vanilla on
the nose – like the Bladnoch 10 that I had some time ago. Grainy elements also
started to show through on the finish, where I hadn’t been able to detect them
before. In spite of that, on the blended scotch scale it sits closer to the
delicate sweetness of the Jim McEwan’s Symphony than it does to what I consider
standard budget blend fare where sweetness is lacking and instead the spirit
seems rough and unpleasant .

Perhaps not one to bring out when the single malt snobs come
round, but I wouldn’t use it for mixing. It’s definitely one to consider if
you’re looking for a decent blend on a budget.

I see from looking at my stats today that this is my 100th
post. Go me. Thanks everyone that has popped by whether it by to read, look at
a picture or whether it was entirely by accident. And apologies for my
tardiness. I’ve not been so good at posting regularly of late, but I’ll keep
trying. See you next week (or later this week) for something else.

Sunday, 20 October 2013

In a change to this week’s planned post that I did myself
the favour of not advertising in advance, I’m going to take you back now to some
“research” that I did in July of this year. And by “research”, I mean drinking
heavily and playing golf in Spain - an event that we chose to christen Golfadeggon. San Javier in Murcia, was the location, where
there are more British per capita than there are in Manchester. That’s not necessarily
a fact; it’s just intended to give you an impression of how many British people
live and visit there. You don’t need a word of Spanish, but I found that you
can mightily impress the locals with just a tiny bit – one taxi driver was
bowled over when I handed him a two euro tip and said, “para ousted.”

“Oh-ho-ho! Speak Spanish!”

“Uh… un poco.”

With our flight at around 3pm, plans were made to meet at
the airport at 12.15 – for ‘a few scoops’. When I got that message from Chris,
I thought he meant he wanted to play golf before we went (if you knew him,
you’d understand), so I said, “no, I’d best not; I don’t want to mess up my
game before we even get there.”

A couple of days later I asked what time he wanted to meet
at the airport, and he asked if I’d been drunk the other night, since he’d
already told me – 12.15.

I wasn’t, as it happens, but now I understand what “a few scoops”
is; it’s a few drinks. I suppose that should go in the Booze Terminology
section…

So it came to pass that the four of us – myself, David,
Chris and John – met in the upstairs bar in Terminal 1 of Manchester Airport,
where they actually have some interesting beers on tap. I stuck with Amstel –
little did I know it would be wall to wall Amstel in San Javier, where it was
an astonishing 2.2 euros per pint up and down the strip.

One night I asked if they had any Spanish lager, whereupon
the English waiter said, “Amstel”, to which I replied, “Amstel isn’t Spanish”
and Chris chimed in with, “It’s Dutch.”

“Is it?” said the waiter. “I literally had no idea that was
the case.”

Amstel it was, then.

We did pick up some Estrella in the supermarket, but it
wasn’t the red kind you get in Barcelona. Instead the cans were green, and
looked to have been brewed in Murcia. Later, at the airport, we found some red
cans and discovered that the red variety is a noteworthy 5.4% ABV, while the
green is a disappointing-but-still-not-to-be-sniffed-at 4.8%.

Unfortunately, the green one isn’t as tasty as the red.

I was a little disappointed at the beer choices because I
like Spanish lager; Estrella, San Miguel, Cruzcampo, Alhambra, Mahou… they’re
all good. I suppose that’s what you get for going to a largely British resort.
Still, at least it wasn’t a choice between Carling and Fosters.

Since we were staying in an apartment on the golf complex –
as far from both the course itself, and the actual town as it was possible to
be… we made it top priority to get supplies in on the first night. I knew that
soft drinks, beer, bacon, eggs and bread would all be essential, but was
surprised to see everyone else’s baskets piled high with biscuits, sweets and
chocolate. I didn’t even pick up a basket because all I wanted was beer, whisky
and perhaps aguardiente de orujo.

DYC 10...

...and in the shower

John had located a Spanish single malt, DYC 10 year old,
while I was still seeking out the booze aisle. “I want that. Where did you find
it?”

I hotfooted it off to get one of my own. It’s packaged in a
chunky Bruichladdich style bottle, weighs in at a standard 40% and cost under
15 euros.

That very evening I cracked it open, eased out the oversized
cork, and sampled the malty goodness. I had actually been looking for the DYC 8
year old blend that scored a remarkable 90 in Jim Murray’s 2013 Whisky Bible [clean
and cleverly constructed, he says, “Just so enjoyable!”]… but they didn’t have
that. I figured a 10 year old single malt must surely be even more interesting,
though I didn’t recall reading anything about it in the guide. Well, we all
liked it anyway. Light-bodied and easy-drinking, we would get through three
bottles of this between us over the course of the week.

David also bought a Spanish blended whisky called John Cor.
That one was under 5 euros, and John confessed to preferring it over the DYC.

I uh… don’t remember too much about the John Cor. It
certainly wasn’t bad – for 5 euros – but I don’t think I’d want to pay too much
more for it. Spirits are so cheap in Spain as a matter of course that you don’t
ever need to buy anything that cheap. It becomes more the sort of thing that
you go, “well, if this is only 11 euro, I may as well also get this
at 5 euro”, because it’s still cheaper than a bottle of Bells at home,
and you’re getting two interesting new bottles.

Chris' Johnnie Walker Red (after a day)

Chris went for a Johnnie Walker Red, which he finished off
in a little over two days – with coke, I might add – but he can’t drink beer
like the rest of us and cider can be hard to find in Spain, so he had to have something
to rely on.

As a result of all this freely flowing booze, my poor
hipflask didn’t get a look-in. One swig on the first day was all it got, and
ever after it was just sat on the kitchen counter. I had considered taking it
on a round of golf with me, but the need to maximise my performance asserted
itself from day one, and by the 5th of the 6 rounds I had started
playing the best golf of my life and didn’t want to jeopardise getting a great
score.

I did get my best ever score for the course we played (which
I had played 5 times previously, two years ago) – 118, but it still wasn’t a great score. And that wasn’t even on the
days when I was playing my best golf! On the best days I was striking the ball
beautifully, but hitting all the hazards and getting some rotten luck. Still, I
now feel great about golf again – no doubt until my next round, when I’ll
realise I’ve forgotten the technique that started working so well for me.

Our general routine for the next week revolved around golf, booze
and food. If we had a morning round it would be up and out, a breakfast of
Coca-Cola and chocolate, followed by lunch and a couple of pints at the
clubhouse after the golf, before swimming, cans, possibly a snooze, and a
shower at the apartment before heading to the main drag where the evening would
be spent eating and drinking at the various bars and restaurants.

We took in some of the entertainment, which was limited to
one-man tribute acts singing to recordings, and in one place for which we had
free drinks vouchers, a Michael Jackson act that was a guy dancing to a live
Michael Jackson video… Chris spent about an hour at the bar trying to get our
free mojitos in there.

If we had an afternoon round, it would be a lie in, followed
by lounging around, golf, a couple of pints at the clubhouse, a shower and
straight out for dinner and more drinks. I tried to take a whisky into the
shower with me every day, as any good alcothusiast should.

We got a couple of games of poker in, using lightweight
Monopoly money instead of chips, but I was having no luck. I think we were all
pretty smashed by the time we got down to it anyway, so there was far less
caution and far less tension that there usually is.

Time at the clubhouse and on the strip was invariably
accompanied by an opening period of silence as everyone got onto the various
free wi-fi and played Super Stickman Golf 2 and Wordfeud – intermittently
glancing up to watch for passing freaks and ghouls. The pints go down easy, and
the food, while unadventurous, is good. Being lads, we nary saw a vegetable the
whole time we were there. It was pretty much meat, chips and bread all the way.

So 108 holes of golf, and seven days after arrival, the day
of departure came. It was beer for breakfast for me, as we still had a few cans
left. We followed that up with an afternoon sat in a bar on the strip, eating
chicken wings and drinking beers until it was time to get to the airport… and
Duty Free – one last thing to look forward to.

I had decided to get at least one purchase in before the
airport because I figured there was a risk – with Murcia Airport being tiny –
that there wouldn’t be much choice on offer. I’d been hoping to get one of
those exclusive to international travel Highland Park expressions, but knew the
chances of this would be low.

I called at the supermarket a day or two early then to pick
up a bottle of the standard Cutty Sark blended scotch (40% ABV). It’s readily
available throughout Spain, but much harder to find in the UK. It features in
my 101 Whiskies to Try Before You Die book, and at 11 euro, is perfect
for a casual purchase, leaving room for further acquisitions later on. It was
tempting to get something else at this time too, since you can nearly bring
back as much as you want, but I was worried about the possibilities of breakages
within my golf travel bag. The stingey weight allowance on Jet2 of 20kg doesn’t
allow for much clothing alongside your golf clubs to pad out the contents.

I wrapped the Cutty Sark in a towel, stuffed it in one of
the larger pockets of my golf bag, and stuffed a few more clothes on either
side.

Duty free was slightly disappointing, but there was still
enough there to choose from. There are two shops selling booze, but from what I
remember, the only scotch on offer is the standard Glenfiddich 12. Instead I focused
on the Spanish stuff, where in the second of the two shops I found the DYC 8 (40%
ABV) that I had been looking for. It was only 14 euro, so I figured I may as
well get something else as well, and went back to the first shop to get some
Gran Duque D’Alba Solera Gran Riserva brandy de Jerez that was 20% off at 21
euro. The Cardinal Mendoza was there too, but I decided to try something
different this time.

A good haul really, and one that leaves me with 6 unopened
bottles of spirits back at the old homestead. I’ve decided to finish one or two
before I open anything new, but with me, you know that’s not going to be long.

It wasn’t all good outcomes. Despite a lovely enthusiastic
welcome from Mrs Cake, we discovered the week long alcohol abuse has left me with
a vastly inflated belly. I’m hoping that works itself off naturally, since with
my back, sit-ups are out of the question. On top of that, because of all the
holiday cigars, I just felt so dirty – and not in a good way. At least, not just
in the good way. I mean, I always have that general background feeling of
dirtiness anyway. That ain’t going nowhere.

So, let me see, were there any particularly funny moments? I
don’t remember anyone falling over in a comical manner or anything like that
but… Chris’ profligate swearing through the various rounds of golf had us all
laughing. One time he exclaimed, “You son of a fuck!” which we soon transposed
into “Son of a fucking fuck” and rode on for the rest of the week.

There was one time on the course where David had a
particularly tricky bunker to get out of, and hit two or three shots before the
ball jumped out into the heavy rough just in front of the bunker. On his next
shot the ball jumped right back into the bunker where it began. Oh, I howled
with laughter. I don’t think that’s considered good etiquette on a golf course,
but it lightens the mood, and I’d prefer people to laugh at me when something
like that happens, than they remain po-faced.

There was definitely a lot of laughing, but those are the
instances of note that I recall.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to justify tagging along next year
too with further booze tourism adventures already in the planning stage, but
definitely the year after that.

Gran Duque d'Alba

So I hope you’ve enjoyed the brief travelogue and have had a
terrific weekend so far. I’ll see you next week with something else, hopefully.

Sunday, 13 October 2013

A forthcoming trip to the Bearded Theory festival (some of
which I told you about previously) a few months ago (messing with conceptions
of time here), led me to considering the purchase of a new white spirit.

As you may have learned before – if you’ve read any of my
previous posts – I can be quite methodical, so my thought process went like
this. The Bearded Theory Festival allows you to take your own booze (both into the
campsite, and into the arena area, which is something of a novelty), in
moderate amounts. Moderate is defined as 16 cans of beer each. They don’t allow
glass.

As well as the beer, I wanted to take some hard liquor – you
know what I’m like. So I thought, I don’t want to take anything special, but I
do want to take something I can enjoy (and that Mrs Cake could drink with a
mixer). Just to narrow down my choices more, I decided to get something that
would look like water when poured into a plastic bottle. I’m sure it wouldn’t
have mattered if it didn’t look like
water, but as I say, I just needed something to narrow down my criteria. So
that left a choice between vodka, gin, tequila and white rum – so it didn’t
narrow my choices down all that much…

Since it couldn’t be special, that meant it could be cheap. What
I settled on then, was white rum. Of course, it is primarily for mixing, but it
does have its uses in hipflasks and for quick pre-sesh swigs – you know; quick
warm-up tugs before you leave the house.

Fate actually decreed that on this rare occasion, I found
myself in the M&S food section in the Trafford Centre the night before the
festival, and they had something that fit the bill; M & S White Rum – yes,
a supermarket own brand from Guyana – ooooh! At £12.19 it was the right price, and assuming
there would be any left after the festival, this would present an opportunity to
ask how budget upstart supermarket Aldi's Old Hopking could stand up to the might and reputation of Marks and Spencer. I like Marks and Spencer, but I don't do much grocery shopping there.

Now, white rum isn’t up to all that much on its own, but
it’s ok. It’s sweet at least, so you can enjoy it without loving it. For the record, I did enjoy it at the
festival. It proved very useful for topping up the old buzz from time to time,
and I’m glad to say that in spite of that, I was able to bring a little home –
in the Nalgene bottle you can see in the picture there.

So one Friday night, after posting my blog and knocking back
a quick Wall Street,
to see if it had improved at all (it hadn’t), I dove into another booze
face-off. I don’t know if there are such things as rum glasses, but if
there are, I don’t have any, so I decided to go with the Glencairn. Let
the tasting commence.

Now, these are cheap brands – around £10 for the Old Hopking
and £12.19 for M & S (both are an indifferent 37.5% ABV), so you can’t expect too much –
and as you might expect, they don’t stand up to too much close scrutiny under discerning,
home-tasting conditions. I embraced my inner geek, and made some tasting notes
for you, in which I noted that on the nose, the M & S brand was a bit caramelly.
Then, for the Old Hopking, I’ve er… confused myself a little, by stating that
it smells sour in comparison – but not in a bad way, and then later I’ve
written, like dirty socks. I’m only telling it how it’s written. It must
have made sense at the time.

On the palate though, for M & S I’ve got that it tastes
like it might have gone a bit stale, though it shouldn’t have since it was only
a week since the festival. Perhaps storing it in a plastic bottle doesn’t do it
any favours. I’ve also got that it tasted a bit fishy, and that it gave me the
impression of being in a seafood restaurant on the coast – not something I want
in my rum, I’m afraid.

For the Old Hopking, I’ve just got that it isn’t as sweet,
but it is fuller bodied. It’s not a bad thing that it lacks the sweetness, and
I do tend to prefer a fuller bodied spirit.

It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable tasting if I’m going to
be brutally honest with you, and I kind of wished I’d broken out the special
stuff earlier. No big loss, Mrs Cake and I went on to finish off the
Bruichladdich Islay Barley later that evening anyway. It just backs up my
theory that white rum isn’t for sipping, but it will serve you well if you want
to mix it or stick it in a hip flask for taking nips when you’re out and about.

Was there a winner? Not really, I’d say you could just get
the one from whatever supermarket you happen to be passing at the time, as a
general rule.

As a postscript though, I’d just like to tell you that there
was a little left in that bottle, and Mrs Cake was encouraging me to finish it
off (she wanted use of the Nalgene bottle back), so I did one evening while I
was cooking dinner. I didn’t bother pouring it into a glass and oddly, I
enjoyed it again. I didn’t bother comparing with the Old Hopking this time; the
simple fact of enjoying the M&S Rum was enough.

In spite of finishing it, I do still have about a quarter of
a bottle of white rum left, so I won’t be needing to get a new one any time
soon. I have been quite slack in my pursuit of varied spirits lately mind, and
have just been buying more bottles of whisky instead of replacing the Putinoff
vodka, Richmond gin and el Jimador tequila that Mrs Cake and I have polished
off. I think that’s a situation to address next month…

There are of course, lots of supermarket own brands still to
try, so maybe one day we’ll have an undisputed supermarket rum champion. Watch
this space.

Sunday, 6 October 2013

Hello everyone. Let me just start by
apologising for my absence over the last few weeks. I’ve been very
busy, and have had to take a break from the blogging game. Bless you if you’ve
missed me. If not, well I expected as much. Either way, this week I’m back to
enrich your life with a new post, and it’s all about a mysterious spirit called
Wall Street that I picked up this summer. Enjoy…

To facilitate giving you my impressions of Wall Street,
I’d best start with a brief rundown of what for me are the essential facets of
booze tourism; the two aims, if you will.

First, in alignment with the basic point of all kinds of
tourism, is the pursuit of new experiences. For the booze tourist that could
mean drinking in local bars, trying the local brew, doing a tasting tour,
visiting a distillery – even going on a booze cruise or ending up in hospital
after drunkenly diving into a fountain in Ibiza and hitting your head…
basically it’s anything alcohol related that pertains to the place you’re
visiting.

The second is concerned with the issue of procurement of things
that you drink and try to get your friends to drink, in order to convince them
that you are exotic and interesting. You know what though? Your friends don’t
care. They’re too busy worrying about how exotic and interesting they appear.

This second aim can be broken into 3 parts:

Procuring something unusual, that you can’t get at home.

Ideally this is some local oddity, such as the
longan wine I picked up in Vietnam or the aguardiente de orujo
and hierbas ibicencasthat I collected in Ibiza. It could just be
some malt liquor that simply doesn’t have a distributor in the UK market. The basic thing is that you’re trying to get
something that you couldn’t’ve picked up at your local supermarket, and ideally
that you couldn’t get without going to the country you went to.

Pick
up something at a bargain price.

Let’s face it, some liquors are
particularly expensive but when you go on holiday they can turn out to be
incredibly cheap. The basic idea here is, if you’re going to Italy, get some
grappa. If you’re going to any of the Caribbean countries, you might want to
think about getting some rum. You get the idea. We’ve covered this before.

Hit the Duty Free.

It’s not just an issue of getting a litre of
something for the price you’d normally pay for 70cl. No, some things are only available in Duty Free. As a booze
tourist, you need to find out what these things are and look for them. This
brings its own problems; how good is the duty free at the particular airport
you’re returning home from? You aren’t going to know until it’s already time to
come home and too late to buy elsewhere. So don’t rely on Duty Free for all
your alcohol purchases, and definitely make sure you pick up your local stuff
beforehand. You never know what they’re going to have in, and the local stuff
is probably going to be cheap enough in general anyway. Thinking about this
just now has made me realise I should start a Duty Free airport guide, so look
out for that sometime in the future…

Diageo... curious

So! Back to my bottle of Wall Street. You might
remember from an earlier post that I picked this up in Vietnam. It appears to
be distributed by Diageo, going off the label on the cap, and it’s a blend of
scotch and ‘Vietnamese spirit’, clocking in at 39% ABV - so below the minimum
level required by the Scotch Whisky Association to be classed as ‘genuine
whisky’. It doesn’t claim to be whisky anywhere on the packaging, and it has
listed as its ingredients, ‘scotch’ and ‘caramel’. What that does make it, I’m
not sure. I do know that caramel is often used as a colourant in whisky
production, so it could just be that. For a bit more science on caramel spirit,
you can visit dramming.com, where it actually says that the Talisker 10 and
Lagavulin 16 are examples of scotch that use caramel for adding colour. Both of
those have managed to maintain ABV levels of over 40% though, so they are
allowed to be called whisky.

As is the case with most brands of alcoholic beverage, there
are more questions concerning this one than answers like:

What is
Diageo’s involvement, and why are they too ashamed to list it on their website?

What has Wall Street got to do with either scotch or Vietnamese spirit?

I haven’t found any answers to those, so let’s just crack on
with some comments.

I haven’t seen this anywhere else, and a search of the
internet yielded a solitary picture of a bottle among someone’s holiday snaps
from Vietnam, so in terms of procurement of items you can’t find anywhere else:
mission accomplished.

The only problem of course, with buying random stuff that
you can’t get at home is that it might not be any good. It might not even be
made for your western palate. I had no idea what it was actually going to be
like. Mrs Cake asked the lady in the shop if she had any idea, and she said she
didn’t drink but her husband was very fond of it. Sadly, that information
didn’t prove all that useful to me – not just because I don’t know him, but
also because… he’s probably Vietnamese, which means he has different terms of
reference to me as far as taste goes. You know; presumably Chinese people like
Baiju, but I’d be surprised if you found many people in the UK who’d go back
for a second glass.

My impressions then, of this Wall Street stuff is that in
spite of its intriguing appearance and mystique, it’s fairly characterless. It
sure is colourful – that’s probably the brightest amber I’ve ever seen in a
spirit.

BRIGHT!

I’m getting nothing on the nose and very little on the
palate. I’m not very good at this whole tasting lark anyway, but usually I can
at least find a spirit tasty or interesting or enjoyable. After an initial hit
of sweetness, this one is a bit like drinking fluff off the carpet. I just didn’t
know now how I was going to get rid of it. I tried it with ice, and while that
was an improvement, it still wasn’t a drink to enjoy. If you’re trying to write
a booze blog and limit your alcohol intake to some degree, you simply can’t go
wasting a drink on something you don’t enjoy.

It ended up being an easy go-to when I wanted a quick swig
of something before going out, and for carrying around in my hipflask .It is
surprisingly effective in a hipflask actually. I don’t know what it is, but
that combination of cold, hard metal and pseudo-whisky gives the impression
you’re drinking something a little more interesting than you actually are. A
few people tried it out of the flask and were impressed.

Worries about getting rid of it were shortlived in the end
because it was summer and there were plenty of occasions when warm-up swigs
were required before heading out to various barbeques and all day drinking
events. As such, it has actually left a void in my life… I don’t really have
anything I don’t like enough to consume as flippantly. I suppose that dubious
honour will have to fall on a cheap brand of rum… Mount Gay Eclipse, or the
alarmingly cheap Liberty Ship - but more on those later…

So that's it. Thanks for joining me once again. I'll be back next week with something else.

Definitions

What happens when you zone out after having had a cheeky lunchtime pint.

Alcothusiast:

Not an alcoholic, someone who appreciates booze.

Anxiety, The:

The uneasy feeling that accompanies any noteworthy hangover.

Booze Buffet Mentality:

The propensity people have to go nuts whenever there's a free bar.

Booze Porn:Photos of alcohol.

Bread Chest:Not booze related, but this term describes the indigestion you get from eating too many bread products too quickly. Just putting it out there...

Crawler's Block:The inability to decide where to go next during a pub crawl - often resulting in crawl stagnation and someone saying, "shall we just have another one here?"

Crawl Stagnation:The result of failing to plan a pub crawl sufficiently - lack of a route, theme or over-familiarity with nearby pubs can all be contributing factors.

Excess Induced Alcohol Aversion:An intolerance for a drink caused (usually) by one occasion of overindulgence.

The Family:My whisky collection.

MOMA:

Moment of Maximum Appreciation. Every bottle has one. It's the time you drink it where you enjoy it most.

Old Man Pub:Traditional British pub, renowned for being quiet, cosy and frequented by old men. Much favoured by people who like a nice chat while they drink.Psychological Drinks Cabinet:Collective term relating to the kinds of alcoholic drinks a person has need for.Road Beers:

Cans of beer that you take with you when you go out, to consume on the way.

The 3 Types of Rum:White, gold and dark. Together they form the base of many a great cocktail.

About Me

Neil Cake is interested in all types of booze, but is by no means an authority or expert. Most of the time he's just trying to be funny, but he is learning, and enjoys sharing his adventures and what he learns on the Drink it How You Like it blog.
Thengyuverrymuuuuuch.